User Experience
For overclockers like myself the BIOS interface is most important, the ASRock Z97 Extreme4 isn’t being market as an OC range board but believe me it’s plenty sufficient for overclocking. It even comes with Dual-BIOS, just in case shit happens and all. 😀 The UEFI overview is good but what I find it lacks is that it doesn’t show the voltage that the system is currently running on, like say what voltage is my processor currently running at.
The interface for ASRock is to me a little confusing when it comes to overclocking. I’ve always felt that the overclocking Interface on ASUS and Gigabyte boards are a notch above the rest. I did give it a try but failed miserably to get to my usual overclock settings.
One good thing about the ASRock board is that the Optimized OC settings are pretty good, I just loaded the 4.4Ghz and it works but of course subsequently I had to lower the speed to match my processor’s limitation. Once the profile is loaded, it’s all good when it comes to knowing which area to tweak.
And so yes, I managed to get it to my usual speed setting.
The Verdict
The ASRock Z97 Extreme4 is a feature rich board that retails at RM 579. There are cheaper alternatives from ASRock for the Z97 range but bear in mind that the Z97 Extreme4 comes with more PCI-E 3.0 slots, DisplayPort (up to 4 video output), better heatsink and also SATA Express.
